That's Handy

My (month-long) review shows that although the design of Handy Assistant is very impressive and the product has incredible potential, version 1.00 of the product has a number of critical bugs which render it unusable, even dangerous because it can lead to missed incoming calls. Paragon would do well to resolve these bugs as soon as possible.
Potential users should test thoroughly before buying!
Firstly, let me say that I think the design of Handy Assistant is extremely well done: its power comes from the definition of a profile and the configuration of when a given profile is active. A profile allows you to control: the behaviour of all sound alerts on your phone and, more importantly, the behaviour of the phone on receiving an incoming call from a contact in a specific category. It also allows you to control what happens if you receive calls from unlisted or unknown numbers. Every profile in Handy Assistant allows you to specify, for each contact category (including unlisted and unknown numbers), whether an incoming call is ignored, rejected, rejected with an SMS, accepted silently, accepted with vibrate only or accepted with ring+vibrate. Handy Assistant defines six profiles out of the box, but you may add as many as you need.
Handy Assistant allows you to determine when each profile is active. A profile can be activated by time of day and day of week, or by location of the phone, or according to what meetings are currently going on in your calendar or manually (from the today screen). Profiles are prioritized so that if any of these aforementioned criteria clash, a single profile can still be selected.
This combination of profile definition and selection makes Handy Assistant very powerful. I can, for example, arrange to: reject all calls except those from Business and VIP contracts during work hours (Work profile), accept all calls during my spare time (Spare Time profile), accept VIP calls with soft ring and Personal calls silently during sleeping hours (Sleep profile) and accept all calls with vibrate only when I am in the library (location based Library profile).
In addition to all this, Handy Assistant allows you to interactively reject phone calls with an SMS, blacklist unwanted calls and record calls.
If my admiration for the design of Handy Assistant is considerable, so is my regret that the implementation of the product falls short of the design. At the moment Handy Assistant has a number of serious bugs and I would urge those of you considering using the product to test it thoroughly before you buy it.
Here are some of the bugs I observed on my HTC Touch Pro:
1. After the phone has received more than 15-20 incoming calls, the ring tone becomes silent (regardless of the profile) and can not be reactivated other than by rebooting the phone. In addition the display of an incoming call also seems to fail after 25-30 calls. This means that I need to reboot my phone every day to keep Handy Assistant working.
2. If the phone has an active data connection (e.g. internet) an incoming call from a contact does not get displayed on the phone (although it will ring and wake up). This bug appears to be caused by the paragon phone dialler application that comes with handy Assistant. If I deactivate this (but keep Handy Assistant in use) it works. Alas, some of Handy Assistants functionality does not work if the Paragon phone dialler is deactivated in this way.
3. Although the profiles can be set to change at configured times, if the phone is in standby (as most phones are, most of the time), the profile does not change at the configured hour. In fact, whatever profile was active at the time the phone last went into standby remains in effect until you wake the phone. This is rather dangerous if your 'Sleep' profile ignores all calls and your phone goes into standby in Sleep mode. It will effectively remain in the Sleep profile all through the night and into the following day - or at least until the next incoming call - which it will ignore - whereapon, when it switches on, it will change profile correctly if the phone is left on for 10-15 seconds. This often means I miss the first call of the working day - unless I remember to wake my phone as I start work.
4. The phone cannot record specific calls at your command. It either records all calls or none.
5. The phone cannot record calls taken via a Bluetooth headset. Only calls taken directly on the handset will be recorded.
6. Currently you can activate a selected profile from the Today screen, this 'overrides' the scheduled profile, but you can't deactivate it (thereby falling back to the profile schedule). You have to enter the Handy Assistant application to do this. It would be nice to be able to deactivate the profile from the today screen.
7. Handy Assitant has some very quirky English in the menus and help text (e.g. "Another Actions" should be either "Other Actions" or "Another Action")
Verdict: a very interesting product with the potential to be extremely useful for business users unfortunately the number of bugs in the first release renders it unusable in my view.